1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data communication; in particular, the present invention relates signaling conventions in data communication.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
In high speed data communications, a serial format has many advantages. For example, a serial format does not require synchronizing the parallel data and avoids the high cost of multiple conductors. However, the serial format must allow the receiver to easily recover the clock signal and to recognize data signal boundaries (e.g., word boundaries). Typically, the receiver includes a sophisticated clock recovery circuit for extracting an embedded clock signal, and the transmitted signal includes a special bit pattern or encoding to demarcate data boundaries.